Maine police unions expressed “alarm and concern” over a proposal to broaden the disciplinary authority of the state’s law enforcement certification board, arguing the new rules would hold officers to vague, subjective standards and make it harder for departments to hire and retain people.
“Our boards of directors, memberships and their families wish to express both alarm and concern for the impact these will have on the men and women of law enforcement throughout the state, regardless of their membership in our organizations,” two unions that collectively represent around 1,200 full-time police officers wrote to the Maine Criminal Justice Academy’s board of trustees, which oversees the certification of all Maine police and corrections officers.
The reaction came in response to a proposal that has been in development for three years by the academy’s board, a 17-member body primarily made up of law enforcement officials.
The board released a draft code of conduct this summer that would expand its disciplinary authority to include conduct that is unethical but falls short of crime, such as sexual harassment, untruthfulness and behavior that undermines the public’s trust in law enforcement. Right now, the board is mostly limited to taking action against an officer’s license for criminal conduct.
But many rank-and-file officers believe their overseers have gone too far, according to Paul Gaspar, executive director of the Maine Association of Police, the union representing about 800 municipal police officers and dispatchers, and Kevin Anderson, executive director of the Maine State Law Enforcement Association, which represents state law enforcement officers except for the Maine State Police.
The draft rules are “cloaked in vagueness” and designed to give the board “unchecked power” to make decisions that could drastically affect officers’ livelihoods and reputations, the unions wrote in a response to the draft during a public comment period that closed in August.
The academy’s board will review the comments and come up with responses during a meeting next Monday, Sept. 30, said Brian Pellerin, who recently stepped down as board chair and serves as deputy chief of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. He has not yet reviewed the comments, he said in an email Monday.
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In late 2019, the BDN’s Maine Focus team began investigating a systemic lack of accountability among Maine’s sheriffs.
The board has proposed disciplining officers for behavior that undermines the public’s trust in law enforcement or the integrity of the profession, but, according to the unions, the draft does not define that standard in specific enough terms.
One of their primary concerns is how the board would apply the new rules in a consistent way and whether the process could be delayed by confusion over how to interpret them.
The academy’s proposal to prohibit officers from harassing people on the basis of sex, race and disability is written to be “broad and subjective as to cast a wide net,” meaning officers could face decertification for “merely an off-color joke told once,” the union officials said.
Police and corrections officers are required to be certified to work in Maine, so revoking an officer’s license can be career-ending. Decertification, however, is not the board’s only disciplinary option: The panel can also suspend an officer’s license, require officers to agree to certain conditions for keeping their license, such as attending counseling, and issue letters of guidance. Officers can appeal discipline in Superior Court.
The unions argued that the academy’s expanded oversight would subvert the authority of other entities that hold them accountable.
The board wants to discipline officers for being untruthful, but the unions argued that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Giglio v. United States already delegates the responsibility of determining an officer’s credibility to the courts. Police chiefs also have the ability to punish their officers but must do so in accordance with rules and definitions outlined in collective bargaining agreements.
“To have this undefined and surreptitious ‘shadow process’ creates fertile ground for due process to be trampled underfoot of powerful and external influences including political, local and public opinion,” Gaspar and Anderson wrote.
The board came up with the new rules in response to legislation in 2021 that expanded its disciplinary powers but delegated the specifics to the academy.
The law, which passed with support from police, was introduced after a Bangor Daily News series identified examples of Maine law enforcement officers who engaged in misconduct that would have jeopardized their certification in states with greater oversight. The academy had no authority to discipline officers who sexually harassed their colleagues or belittled an inmate based on his race and developmental disability, for instance.
When the academy released the draft new rules this summer, Pellerin said the proposal “captures the things that we would see before the board that made us a little disgusted, and a lot frustrated, [but] really didn’t fall under our purview and authority.”
The unions that authored the fiery letter also belong to an advocacy group that includes two other unions, the Maine State Troopers Association and Maine Fraternal Order of Police. That group, the Maine Law Enforcement Coalition, submitted a separate response to the draft that criticized it for “lacking the specificity and clarity typical of professional standards” and suggested the academy “further define the terms in each subsection.”
